The Changing Floral Color Landscape Across an Alpine Elevation Gradient

Abstract

Flowers at high elevation must deal with less than ideal conditions, both abiotic and biotic. A limiting biotic factor plants must cope with at high elevations is pollinator limitation. With increasing elevation, insect groups such as Hymenoptera decrease with abundance whereas the abundance of Dipteran as a group remains the same. Thus, there is a shift in the dominant pollinator guild with increasing elevation: bees are predominant at lower elevations and with increasing elevation flies predominate. With this pollinator shift there could be a corresponding shift in floral color composition of communities with increasing elevation. Using spectral analysis we found that with increasing elevation there is a significant decrease in violet and blue- flowered species and a significant increase in green, yellow, orange and red flowered species. In our initial analysis of both bee and vision space we have evidence that pollinators may be able to distinguish these changes in floral color composition in communities of different elevations.

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